This is your captain speaking

So NASA had William Shatner wake up the crew of Discovery as Captain Kirk

“Space, the final frontier. These have been the voyages of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Her thirty-year mission, to seek out new science, to build new outposts, to bring nations together on the final frontier, to boldly go and do what no spacecraft has done before.”

Bit risky wasn’t it? What if they weren’t asleep, but he just caught them in the middle of an Apollo 13-style crisis. “Captain Kirk’s talking to me, I must be dead already,” they’d have thought.

Or if the ship’s computer had gone bonkers, 2001-style, when the starfleet wunderkind piped up? “Don’t tell us they’ve got to earth too.” It might have ended up like Planet of the Apes.

There have however been less misguided celebrity’s speaking to those in unspeakable places stunts.

Like the time when Leslie Neilsen addressed the Uruguayan rugby team that fell out of a plane in the Andes mountains, affecting to be Dr Barry Rumack from Airplane! Or when Sean Connery spoke to the crew of the Kursk submarine pretending to be Marco Raimus out of The Hunt for Red October.

“I miss the peace of fishing like when I was a boy.”

They might have been better advised to get Marco Raimus to talk to the crew of Discovery. He at least might have some handy hints for them. Like this one:

“Be careful what you shoot at. Most things in here don’t react too well to bullets.”

Or this:

“It reminds me of the heady days of Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin when the world trembled at the sound of our rockets. Now they will tremble again – at the sound of our silence. The order is: engage the silent drive.”

Or they could have got Leslie Neilsen to say:

“The life of everyone on board depends upon just one thing: finding someone back there who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner.”